I pay £42 for every contact hour I have- Engineers pay only £18. Today, my two-hour lecture cost me £95, while their 5-hour day cost them £90. Who will earn more on graduating?

As a History of Art student, I study what I love and enjoy my lectures. What I do not enjoy, is paying for them. With fees rising up to £9000 a year, University has become a lot more expensive to attend. The frustrating part is that the tuition fee most arts students pay does not reflect on the amount of tuition they receive. Living with three Engineering students and an Astrophysicist, I hear about what they do in lectures and classes. From 9am starts to 6pm finishes, I’m amazed at how little time they have to do assignments. My Physicist housemate has an 8-hour lab in one day- the same that many arts students, including myself, have in a week. This seems immensely unfair when we are paying the University exactly the same amount of money.

It worked out that the average Engineer student has about 20 hours of timetabled contact time. In this time, they have access to state-of-the-art equipment and detailed lectures. Most BA subjects have, on average, an 8-hour week. Adding this up for an academic year, Engineers have roughly 500 hours of contact time, and humanities students a mere 189. I have less contact hours in one year than an Engineer has in a single semester. This, then, means I pay £42 for every contact hour I have- Engineers pay only £18. Today, my two-hour lecture cost me £95, while their 5-hour day cost them £90. Yet, both subject lecturers are being paid the same salary.

Now, BA students are required to do 10 hours of reading outside of lectures, adding up to the same amount of ‘contact time’ as an Engineer. So does this mean that all this money is paying for a library pass? With most arts subjects, there are still additional costs, such as trips and incredibly costly text books. Moreover, the price for each hour does not acknowledge the reading weeks some subjects have, which is essentially like a half term week. That is £752 worth of untaught hours.

On top of all that, after visiting the careers fair on Monday, it was apparent how little funding there was for students with a BA degree. Even the fall back of being a teacher did not aim to inspire students, as their bursaries and funding for the teacher-training courses were all for Physics and IT students. An overwhelming amount of stalls focused their pitches only on Finance and Engineering students. Suddenly, it was dawning on me how hard it was to get a job, after paying £27,000 that was supposed to open endless doors for me. BSc students have employers physically seeking them out.

And on top of it all, they actually have £9,000 worth of teaching. Now, I cannot complain about my lie-ins. Nor can I confess that despite it all, I would ever choose an Engineering or Medicine degree. I have always been the creative type and engineering would bore me, but it is scary to look at my job prospects and think, ‘what was this all for?’.

Considering my contact time and struggle of getting into an industry after graduating, it seems rather unfair that BA students are paying the same fee as that of a BSc student. After all, my expensive library pass expires after 3 years.

Jasmine Vincent